


if you let my soul out (it'll come right back to you)

by aghamora



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Drabble, F/M, I Love You, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-08
Updated: 2017-02-08
Packaged: 2018-09-22 23:01:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9629033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: Three words. They’re so simple.They’ve taken her so long.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [Recommended listening](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIrnXFAHK8U). Because nothing makes me more emo about Flaurel than that song.

Three words. So short. So simple.

They take her so long to say.

It takes her months, after the fire, after Wes, after the baby slips away in a pool of blood one night without pain. Months to let him in again, months to even remotely consider it. It feels like ages she spends pushing him away time after time, heartless and cruel, and she isn’t kind about it; more often than not she’s mean, nasty. She says terrible, hateful things to him, and he takes them, accepts the blows as they come, never flinching. Never giving up on her, even though it’d probably be easier for both of them if he did.

She’s angry at the world. Bitter. Hardened. She lashes out for no reason. She’s so hard to love, and he loves her anyway.

And things do get better. They get better in time.

She heals. They both do. They climb their way back to some semblance of normality, even though after everything _normality_ will probably never exist for them again in any conventional sense. There’s no specific time or date or deciding moment when they wind up sharing a bed again; it happens naturally, like some sort of unspoken pact, a combination of both their aversions to sleeping alone after everything and whatever tattered scraps of their love still remain. It should feel strange, after so long. Awkward. But instead it just feels so easy, like something is drawing them back together, some binding force of nature they could never escape, no matter how hard they’d tried.

There’s no kissing. No sex. No touching. None of that. They aren’t together, or anywhere near it.

They won’t be together for a very, very long time.

Others would get impatient. Restless and dissatisfied. Frank doesn’t. He just stays, so unfailingly loyal and faithful sometimes she wants to scream at him, demand to know _why_ , what she has to do to make him hate her, leave her. He never does, never even seems to consider it. He loves her with such fierce devotion she can’t comprehend it; without judgement, without demands or expectations.

He loves her. He tells her all the time.

Not passionate, long-winded declarations; just little things, softly-spoken, casual words that slip off his tongue out of habit. Before he goes to sleep. Before she leaves for class or he leaves for work. Like it’s nothing at all. They’re routine for him, so easy to say, and he’s never frustrated when she doesn’t say them back, when she only nods, only pinches a smile onto her lips in lieu of an answer. He could give up on her, and sometimes Laurel thinks he should. Sometimes she thinks she’s been hurting too long to love at all. But he doesn’t.

There’s no particular reason she says it when she does.

Nighttime. They’re lying in bed together. Frank turned off the light half an hour ago, rolled over onto his side, mumbled a faint _I love you_ before, ostensibly, drifting off. And there’s nothing about any of that that’s out of the ordinary, nothing in particular that spurs the words or draws them out of her. Suddenly it just feels _right_ , like all the planets and stars and nebulas have aligned perfectly to bring them to this moment in time, this little corner of the world.

Laurel hadn’t been waiting for some magical moment. She hadn’t been waiting for anything, really.

But she knows, right then. Knows it in her bones.

“I love you.”

Soft – so soft. Hardly a whisper. She’s certain he’s asleep beside her, that he won’t even hear, that the words will be for her ears and her ears only, and maybe it’s better that way. Maybe they aren’t destined for love, together. Or maybe they’re too broken to know what love is, anymore.

Nothing. For a moment she’s certain he’s asleep.

Then, he stirs.

He stirs, and rolls over to face her, eyes hazy, full of sleep. He looks vaguely confused, like he couldn’t possibly have heard those words; like he thinks they came to him in a dream, invented by his mind, his own wishful thinking, but when he meets her eyes and sees her looking back, he seems to realize they’d been real. He goes still beneath the blankets; very still. So still she thinks he may stop breathing altogether.

He lets silence settle over them, for a second. Then-

“You mean that?”

His voice, just as soft, carrying across the sheets. There’s disbelief in his eyes, like a dog regarding proffered affection with wariness, after only ever being beaten and maimed over and over.

She nods. “Yeah.”

Silence, again, but now there’s no burden to fill it. It washes over them soothingly like the moon pulling the tides, enfolding them, and neither of them mind. All he does for the longest moment is look at her, blue eyes saturated with tenderness. She’s never seen him look at her like this, before. Like a mortal staring at a goddess descended to Earth, certain she can’t be real.

He’s waited so long to hear those words. Of course he’s sure they can’t be real.

“I do,” she continues, finally, and reaches over, slipping her little hand into his above the blankets; the gesture innocent, chaste, and their love was never innocent or chaste but it is now, somehow, some impossible way. “I should’ve… I should’ve told you, before. A long time ago.”

She had, it occurs to her out of nowhere. On his voicemail, once, the night Bonnie had pumped her full of shots until she was too hammered to stand and made her call him. She thinks she’d meant it, then, but that hadn’t counted, hadn’t mattered. It’d been to deceive him and he’d known that. There’s no ulterior motive behind her words, now. No reason for her to stay them other than that she wants to.

She _does_ want to. She wants to say them over and over until her mouth goes dry, until her throat is raw. She never wants to stop.

“That don’t matter,” he murmurs, squeezing her hand. He looks so sure. He’s always been so _sure_ of her, believed in her with such staunch, unshakable conviction. “You did now.”

He could say something about how he’d known anyway, even though she’d never told him, but Laurel knows the fact of the matter is that he _hadn’t_ known. Ever since she’d wished him dead that day in the hospital, in pain and traumatized and medicated too heavily to see straight, he hasn’t been sure. And all those times in the months that’d followed, the times she’d screamed at him, called him names, tried so hard to drive him away. No, he hadn’t known. Not at all.

He knows, now. Laurel watches the realization flood his eyes in the moonlight, make them glow with warmth. And she knows he knows.

“Can you, uh,” he says, suddenly, expression flickering with doubt, “can you say that again? So I know I’m not dreamin’.”

She goes to him, at once, moves closer and rests her head on his pillow. She can feel her heart breaking, cracks forming in that pulsing mass of arteries and ventricles and blood. He doesn’t believe her. He’s spent so long not knowing, not believing she could ever love him, that he thinks this must not be real.

“I love you,” she says, and allows herself a tentative little smile. “You’re not dreaming.”

She doesn’t know how to describe the look on his face, as the realization dawns on him, folds itself out across his features. It looks like the sun peeling back the clouds after an eternity of darkness, of misery and sorrow and so much pain. He’s known so much pain. _Caused_ so much pain. They both have, albeit in vastly different ways.

She loves him in spite of all that. She loves him so much she can’t breathe.

He reaches out, places his hand on her cheek, caressing it with the pads of his fingers and drawing her closer. And it feels cosmic to her, this moment in time, like it's re-centering the earth’s gravity, shifting the universe around them, scrambling the Milky Way. Laurel knows perfectly well it's not. There are suns and stars in distant galaxies a million times bigger than their own sun, stars that make their sun look like a tiny speck of dust, and the two of them are just tiny specks of dust on this tiny speck of dust called Earth, and ultimately this moment is so tiny too, so inconsequential. It's nothing.

It’s everything.

“I love you too,” he tells her, and she blinks, doubt creeping in before she can help it.

“Why?” she asks, and he blinks. “I’ve been… awful to you. Said things…”

She drifts off. It isn’t entirely about what she’d said, Laurel thinks. In many ways it’s what she _didn’t_ say; how she’d withheld those words, starved him of them until he’d become convinced he’d never hear them. It’d been a silent kind of cruelty, but cruelty all the same.

And he’s no angel. They both know that. He’s not a good man, in many ways, but loving her had seemed to be all that’d driven him at times, in the months after the fire, the weeks he’d spent locked away behind bars because he believed it’d been what she wanted; him gone, gone for good. It’d sustained him like breathing, like a reflex, pumped through his veins with his blood.

She’d known, a long time ago, that she loved him. Knew the night he brought her home to his family. All those nights they’d spent cooking dinner together in his apartment, making love after. The night she’d wished him dead in the hospital and he’d just stood there, jaw clenched, and taken it, let her words slice at him like knives, until she was satisfied and he was broken. Really they both were.

She could never tell him. Let him in. Give him the tools with which to break her even worse than he’d already broken her so many times before. She never could, and it’s been so long, and they’ve suffered so much, done so much harm to each other, and rebuilt their worlds together. And she knows she can, now.

She knows it as sure as she’s breathing.

“That don’t matter now,” he tells her, quietly emphatic, still so certain. “Nothing… nothing you did could ever make me stop. Nothing you can _do_ can ever make me stop. I love you.” He gulps. She can hear a strain in his voice, see tears glistening faintly in his eyes. He presses a kiss to her temple, curling his arms around her. “I love you so much, Laurel.”

He means it. She’s never heard a human being mean anything more in her life; he packs each syllable with such sincerity it makes her shiver, shakes her to her core. She’s never known unconditional love like this, ever. And maybe the way they’d started had been littered with distrust and lies and secrecy. Maybe from the start they’d never had much of a chance, and maybe they’d always been doomed. But there’re no secrets now, no lies, everything laid out plain on the table before them.

They’d started bad. They’re better, now. They got better, together.

They’ve lost so much, too. Lost each other, and found each other again. They’ve suffered more than any two people should but now they’re finally here, this terminus, this crossroads; this blessed moment of peace. It’s not a happy ending. Not an ending at all, she thinks. A beginning, rather; a beginning contained in those words, far too short for all the promise and possibility they hold.

Three words. They’re so simple. They’ve taken her so long.

But he holds her until she sleeps, holds her fast against him, and that’s all she needs to know that that doesn’t matter now.


End file.
